text: The experimental principles of the HeSE experiment are analogous to those of neutron spin echo, differing in details such as the nature of the probe/sample interactions that give rise to scattering. In outline, a polarized He beam is created by a supersonic expansion followed by a spin-filtering stage (polariser). The helium scatters from the experimental sample and is detected at the end of the beamline after another spin-filtering stage (analyser). Before and after the scattering process, the beam passes through magnetic fields that precess the probe spins in the usual sense of a spin echo experiment. The raw data of the experiment are the spin-resolved scattered helium intensities as a function of the incoming magnetic field integral, outgoing field integral and any other variable parameters relevant to specific experiments, such as surface orientation and temperature. In the most general kind of scattering-with-precession experiment, the data can be used to construct the 2D wavelength intensity matrix  for the surface scattering process, i.e. the probability that a helium atom of a certain incoming wavelength scatters into a state with a certain outgoing wavelength.
  Conventional spin echo measurements are a common special case of the more general scattering-with-precession measurements, in which the incoming and outgoing magnetic field integrals are constrained to be equal. The polarization of the outgoing beam is measured as a function of the precession field integral by measuring the intensity of the outgoing beam resolved into different spin states. The spin echo case is referred to as a type of tilted projection measurement. Spin echo measurements are an appropriate tilted projection for quasi-elastic measurements of surface dynamics because the raw data are closely related to the intermediate scattering function (ISF), which in many cases can be interpreted in terms of standard dynamical signatures.